Carpet is extremely prevalent as a floor covering in commercial and residential buildings. Carpet owners often choose to have their carpet professionally cleaned for a variety of reasons, including difficulty of the cleaning task, superior professional quality cleaning, and lack of access to cleaning equipment, among others. Many professional carpet cleaning services employ truck-mounted carpet cleaning equipment Truck-mounted carpet cleaning equipment incorporates the major mechanical components of the carpet cleaning equipment within a truck or van, and only hoses and hose attachments need to be brought into the building.
The hoses required for carpet cleaning equipment are generally of two types: hoses for sup plying positive pressure fluid for applying cleaning solution to the carpet, and hoses for supplying negative pressure for removing cleaning solution and contaminants. The hoses are heavy-duty to withstand repeated use and must be long enough to extend from the truck to the interior of the buildings, and consequently, the hoses may be fairly heavy. The negative pressure hoses are often corrugated or reinforced, and a ridged outer surface is common.
As the working-end of the hose is dragged into the building, the workers must maneuver it around interior walls. The hoses will tend to contact any outside corner (i.e. convex corner) around which it is dragged. Often, the wall is constructed of a material that is easily marked or marred, such as painted drywall or wood. Due to the weight and construction of the hoses, marking, marring, or otherwise damaging outside corners is a significant concern.
Carpet cleaning professionals mitigate the probability that hoses will damage outside corners within the building by placing temporary corner guards in areas that are likely to sustain damage. Temporary corner guards are typically made from durable materials, such as metal or plastic, and take the form of a pair of angled protective surfaces joined at 90 degrees that will cover and protect the area of the wall's outside corner near the ground that extend up to two feet above the floor surface and incorporate a base component that allows the corner guard to be freestanding without need to attach it to the outside corner that is being protected.
Current commercially available embodiments of temporary corner guards are not designed to be particularly stable. Carpet cleaning professionals will place the temporary corner guards to prevent damage as hoses are dragged around them, but because the temporary corner guards are not particularly stable, they are often easily upset from their original placement, which exposes the outside corner to potential damage. Some commercially available embodiments of corner guards incorporate adjustable bases that can accommodate uneven floor surfaces to enhance stability in areas where floor-height varies at the corner, such as in a stairwell. While this type of corner guard enhances stability in a specific and limited situation, it is still quite susceptible to being upset from its placement by a hose being dragged across it during the cleaning process.
Particularly, existing temporary corner guards are unstable due to a high aspect ratio, in which the center of mass of the device is easily moved outside of the bounds of the device base. The center of mass is too high, the base is too narrow, and/or the total device mass is too low to resist tipping or upsetting.
Therefore, a need exists for a temporary corner guard that resists being upset during the carpet cleaning process. Ideally, a temporary corner guard could be placed without affixing it to the wall being protected, and it would remain in place throughout the cleaning process, even as heavy hoses are dragged against it